It was among many violent crimes that would come to define this tumultuous year in American history.Īndy Warhol was the most recognized artist working in America.Īt the time he was shot, Andy Warhol “was easily one of the most recognized and popular artists working in America,” according to Jose Diaz, curator of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (where Warhol was born). She thought he was was going to steal her manuscript, he ignored her calls.

Includes essays by Marina Chao, Renee Gladman, Catherine Lord, and Ariana Reines.Ģ88 pages, 24.5 x 32.5cm, softcover, MACK (London).Moments after Valerie Solanas entered Andy Warhol’s sixth-floor office at 33 Union Square West on June 3, 1968, carrying two guns and a massive, paranoid grudge, their lives would be changed forever. Each work in SCUMB sounds an electrifying call for freedom - the freedom to create, to destroy, to imagine, and to reshape our visual and social world. While markedly different in style, the defiant female visions pictured in these compositions are a continuation of those depicted in Kurland’s earlier photographic projects Girl Pictures (1997–2002) and Mama Babies (2004–07). Each collage is a reclamation of history a dismemberment of the patriarchy a gender inversion of the usual terms of possession and a modest attempt at offsetting a life of income disparity. Kurland’s is a restorative and loving ritual.

The nature of collage - heterogeneous, pulled apart, shape shifting, disrupted, cyborg, fantasy - has long made it a feminist strategy in life and in art. This volume presents a collection of collages Kurland created by cutting up and reconfiguring photobooks by male artists, as she went through the process of purging her own library of roughly 150 books by straight white men that have monopolised the photographic canon. Inspired by Valerie Solanas’ iconoclastic feminist tract SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, SCUMB introduces us to photographer Justine Kurland’s own uncompromising initiative: the Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books.

Scum society for cutting up men